Bridgend County Borough Council is undertaking condition surveys on all its buildings as it starts the process of working out what assets it will need in the future and what it can do without.

The local authority is midway through a three-year management transformation of its 940 assets, with a new model and team, called corporate landlord.

Currently it spends around £20m of revenue funding a year on assets which range from care homes, schools and industrial units to bus shelters and pieces of land.

The figure includes over £4m on staff and around £16m on materials, labour, external contractors, and major or minor capital work.

At a recent council meeting, officers said that once the surveys were complete, decisions would need to be taken on the future of council buildings.

Mike Butler, managing director of Peopletoo, a consultancy being used by BCBC to remodel its estate, told councillors: “Once we have all the information on the assets and the surveys have been done, which should be by October, then as a council you will make a decision on whether those assets meet the needs of the council, now and in the future.

“It may be that there are alternative uses for them or that you decide to rationalise your existing assets.”

Officers said decisions could involve anything from demolishing a building and building a replacement to selling the land for development.

Peopletoo is providing seven people to support council staff as the local authority changes its approach to areas such as facilities management, energy and compliance.

The firm is directly managing the service having provided the temporary head of corporate landlord, Tim Washington.

Council officers said that despite trying on three separate occasions to appoint a permanent replacement, they had been unable to find someone of the “right calibre and senior management skills”.

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The council’s recently-renewed 18-month contract with Peopletoo is expected to cost between £300k to £350k with the consultancy bringing expertise in various areas such as finance and transformation.

At the scrutiny committee, Mr Butler said: “The key aim for us is that in the next 18 months you won’t require us.”

Making the service more efficient is a key part of the corporate landlord model.

Head of operations for community services, Zak Shell, said: “Previously, the corporate assets sat with lots and lots of managers all over the authority, all of whom had a primary role that wasn’t related to looking after buildings.

“Their primary role was related to providing social care, parks or streetlighting, and, probably, bottom of the list was actually to look at the asset back at base where they functioned from.

“There wasn’t anyone corporately looking after the assets to make sure we best utilise them, best spend our money on them, and efficiently and effectively look after them, and that’s the entire purpose of having a corporate landlord structure.

“It’s effectively a department that sits within the communities directorate, and that’s where responsibility now sits for those assets.”

He told councillors the previous system had been so inefficient that a scheme designed to save money had in fact cost much more than it needed to.

He said: “About two years ago we looked at how re could reduce overtime hours in car parks.

“We used to have staff on stand-by payment in case they got called out because somebody had their car locked in one of our car parks.

“Having examined all the different options we came up with the solution of using external firms which provide key holding arrangements which are a lot cheaper than having somebody constantly on standby for our car parks.

“We put that in place, ticked the box and all felt quite proud of ourselves.

“The reality is that as an authority we actually have the best part of 100 key holding contracts, all let independently.

“We’re not getting best value because we’re all operating in our own individual silos, doing our own little things.

“Nobody was asking how many key holding arrangements we have, how do we best procure that as an authority to get best value for money – that’s the shift we are trying to make, looking at everything we do.”

Another area of the new corporate landlord model has involved offering services to schools on a tiered basis.

Schools budgets are delegated to individual schools and under the new system, they can buy services back from the council, and choose the level of service.

This involves support, advice, compliance item checks and scheduled works with the aim of ultimately providing a fully managed service.

So far more than 40 schools in the county have signed up for the service paying a total of around £500k to the council for it.

Mr Washington told councillors there were plans to expand the services the council offered to schools and other public sector organisations as part of income generation for the local authority.

He said: “We are already in discussions with Bridgend College in providing cleaning support and other service facilities to them.

“For Awen, we’ve just entered into an agreement where we are cleaning some of Awen’s facilities.

“I see that as being a growth area driven by ‘are we competent and are we seen as being cost-effective’ because ultimately that’s a very open market place we can compete in.”

Officers said the focus across the authority was also moving to a planned maintenance programme helping avoid issues before they arise.

They said the way the council’s estate was now managed was “considerably more” efficient.